Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet): From Shakespearean Tragedy to Postmodern Satyr Play‪.‬

Northrop Frye followed in the footsteps of Aristotle and the author of the Tractatus Coislinianus in his attempt to define and describe the main aspects of the literary genres in the monumental Anatomy of Criticism. For centuries Aristotle's theory of poetics had been understood as prescriptive instead of descriptive; thus any effort to establish a schematic approach to literary theory in the twentieth century--the age of experimentation, rule bending, and wholesale rule breaking--was likely to encounter strong opposition. While there are certain limitations to Frye's schematic system in dealing with many modern and postmodern works that defy classification into any genre, it is precisely the clear delineation of subcategories and elements within the genres that promotes his theory as the most useful in a study of works that either are based upon a prescriptive view of poetics or are contemporary revisions of such works. I am not suggesting that Shakespeare's notions about dramatic genres were shaped by Aristotle's Poetics, or that he would have necessarily understood them as prescriptive; equally, I am not suggesting that AnnMarie MacDonald necessarily relied on Frye's theory to write her play. I am merely taking Aristotle as an example of a generic theory which, while it may not have directly influenced English Renaissance playwrights or Shakespeare himself, certainly resonates with Horace's much-read Art of Poetry and is exemplified in the much-imitated tragedies of Seneca--two crucial literary forces whose authority during the early modern period became the foundation of the future prescriptive and rigid understanding of genre theory. In a similar fashion, Frye's work is the best twentieth-century example of a schematic approach to literary theory that many understood as prescriptive, and it is, because of his appropriation of Aristotelian terminology, a perfect complement to Aristotle's Poetics in my comparative analysis of dramatic texts from two eras.